By ANTHONY QUINN in London
Even if it were not dragging a flotilla of film festival prizes in its wake, Whale Rider fetches up on Britain's shores with something to prove.
It's one thing to collect awards in the benign climate of the festival circuit, and another to convince audiences that a movie in which whales are saved isn't just a worthy eco-hymn.
From advance reports, I had envisaged a solemn Maori-style rerun of Free Willy, perhaps combined with a defanged version of Lee Tamahori's breakdown-of-a-culture epic, Once Were Warriors.
I was mistaken.
While not absolutely the knockout some have promised it to be, Whale Rider makes for crowd-pleasing entertainment, cleaving gracefully to a path of realistic storytelling before careening late on into the mythic.
If there is a film with which it has resonances, it's Jane Campion's The Piano, especially in its austere celebration of female cussedness and independence.
Unlike Holly Hunter's mute Ada, the heroine of this picture speaks, but her voice too is silenced, metaphorically at least, by a narrow social tradition that privileges the male.
- INDEPENDENT
Herald Feature: Whale Rider
Whale Rider receives pass mark in a tougher test
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